Day: July 28, 2013

Vikki and John Woodward are a married couple in Tallahassee, Florida. They are the authors of TERRA LUNA, an epic urban contemporary romance, which they have published on Amazon Kindle. Two sequels are under way, and they recently completed IN THE CAT’S EYES, a paranormal romance and thriller which they hope to publish soon.

Every day I would sit in my car under a giant oak tree, and wait for my sister to finish work so I could give her a ride home. I’ve amused myself by making up and telling stories all my life, and during those weeks of sitting under that oak I made up a story about the tree: a Faerie and many other critters lived in and around it.

I started writing my story down in a notebook. Whenever my sister would finally leave work, I read her the next installment of the story. She was impressed and encouraged me to continue. I mentioned to my husband John I was writing a story about a Faerie that that had to live in two worlds: our Human one where she pretended to own the Faerie Lands (a private “wildlife preserve”) and her Faerie community, where she never fully fit in or was trusted.

Although I had never seen or heard of Little Five Points in Atlanta, Terra Luna’s Human community, when I described to John what I saw in my mind’s eye he said that L5P was exactly it. Weeks later he took me there. It was strange, because it was just as I had imagined.

I have a lot of stories and characters in my head, but it is hard for to put solid words into a story the way I’d like. John is great, really super at research and the technical stuff, whereas I provide the ideas. Honestly, my grammar and syntax need help, which John gives me. I am the creative and emotionally wise half of the team. My characters need me to write their life story and I need John to help, because honesty I could not do it without him. I can tell to my stories to anyone that would listen, but I really and truly need John to write in a comprehensive way so people can appreciate them.

John:

I used to write nonfiction, mostly articles for magazines that dealt with disability issues. I learned the mechanics of getting to the point, cutting excess, keeping the grammar good and simple and so on. I offered to help Vikki write TERRA LUNA because she needed help with the Prologue, in which a jumbo jet crashes at take off and only the baby Terra Luna survives. The scene had to be tragic and was just too sad for her. I wrote it so she could begin the main story. A few pages later, I decided that the minor character Barry Davie should be a doctor who would eventually become the hero’s best friend and deliver the heroine’s baby. That was my start as a creative contributor.

Vikki created all the major characters in our book, and half the minor ones. Nothing gets in without her approval. The final decisions about plot, descriptions and continuity are always hers. My job is to get it into the computer file. We began writing together at night, with her describing what should happen and me writing it. We switched to a system where she described to me every night what should happen next, and I would write it the next day while she was at work. Then I would read it to her in the evening, she would correct any mistakes and we would repeat the cycle. Later on I invented a few scenes of my own, to give the characters extra room to grow.

My own “growth” as a writer has mainly been a steady improvement in my skills as an editor and re-writer. We spent hundreds of hours writing TERRA LUNA — it’s an epic — but I spent almost twice as long on editing and re-writing.

We have now finished our second book, IN THE CAT’S EYES. Whereas TERRA LUNA is urban fantasy, CAT’S EYES is a paranormal romance set in New Orleans. It started as our National Novel Writing Month book for 2012. We are currently writing the second book the TERRA LUNA series, RAVEN. We don’t know when CAT’S EYES will be published, or when RAVEN will be finished, but we are looking ahead to Labor Day Weekend, when we will join the Novel-in-Three-Days challenge and November, when we will do National Novel Writing Month again.

It’s strange that I always envisioned myself as a “writer,” but never had any plots that excited me enough to sit down and write. Vikki gave me the gift of her imagination, and that made all the difference.